【kaleidoscope】小组第8次作业 Issue184 by Azoi

azoiUID: 2636348

TOPIC: ISSUE208 - "The way people look, dress, and act reveals their attitudes and interests. You can tell much about a society's ideas and values by observing the appearance and behavior of its people."
WORDS: 543
TIME: 0:44:53
DATE: 2009/8/13

Would people's appearance and behavior be an honest mirror of their attitudes and interests? And would such appearance truly reflect a society's idea and values? The speaker answered "yes" to both questions. As for me, after a careful meditation, I tend to agree with the author's threshold contention while preserve my own opinion on the latter one.

To start with, I hold the same idea of the assertion that the way people look, dress and behave can reveal their attitudes and interests. Albeit many people would agree with the old saying of "Never judge a person from his appearance", I must point out that this idiom mostly applies in the term of capability, not attitudes and interests. Generally speaking, people don't usually try to hide their true attitude or interests unless they ponder them peculiar. Sometime people are even fond of showing their interests to others, in order to meet similar peers and make friends. In short, it's quite safe, in most cases, to judge one's attitudes and interests from their dress and act nowadays.

But how to judge a person from his behavior? As is known all, every individual grows up in diverse environments. Some people came from wealthy families, their childhood were spent in a cozy atmosphere, without struggling for life. There's much possibility that they could receive decent education and was quite socialized. Such experiences would likely to form a sound personality, often equipped with generosity and humbleness. On the contrary, people from families which are not so well-off would likely to have a personality emphasizing self-esteem and economical senses. These are just some aspects of appearance revealing personal information about an individual. For another instance, a teenager wearing baggy pants indicates that in all possibility, he holds a easy and comfortable attitude towards life, maybe with some self style.

Referring to the author's second assertion, I cannot hold fully agreement to it, since if we rashly apply this idea to our everyday life; it would be highly possible to cause some misunderstandings in different societies. We all know that societies are comprised by individuals, and we accumulate our observations on every individual to form our impression on a certain society. When we don’t have sufficient samples, it’s basically fallacious to conclude a society’s ideas and values by observing its people. Yet nowadays everyone's ideas and values are sheer different that it would be unwarranted to make an analogy to others when we have a certain impression of a society. As an Asian, I watched many Hollywood movies, and much of the hero movies tend to portrait Americans very open relating to sex affairs, yet it is not necessarily the case when it comes to many religious or conservative folks. Therefore, it is quite unwise to judge a whole society's ideas and values because there is maybe doesn’t exists one since all people are different by all means.

In the final analysis, I strongly agree with the speaker's first assertion that we are safe to tell a person's attitudes and interests by his look, dress and act. In the meanwhile, I doubt about the second contention the speaker holds because only few people of a society could cause a stereotype which could hamper our further understanding of a certain society.